The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week President Sarkozy has made the right decision by avoiding the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The global titans of banking and politics are not looking good: to be photographed having fun with them would be a provocation. Not since the oil crises of the 1970s has there been less confidence in the people in charge. In normal times, one may not think very much about the astronomical sums made by money men, but one’s acceptance of their rewards depends on the idea that they run risks. Now it turns out that they don’t. There is a well-known saying that if you owe the bank £100, that is your problem, but if you owe it £1 million, that is its problem. What happens when the banks themselves owe several billion pounds?

The news that the circulation of the Sun sank below three million in December, its lowest since the early Seventies, is a landmark. The moment that the Sun’s circulation overtook that of the Mirror, in May 1978, revealed a big shift in the political and social history of this country. No longer were the aspirations of the working class linked umbilically to the Labour movement, as, since 1945, they had appeared to be. In a conversation I once had with Rupert Murdoch, who has owned the Sun since 1969, he explained the trend. The Sun rose, he said, because, with post-war recovery, working people wanted more freedom and more fun. They owned cars, they could buy much more home entertainment and foreign holidays; they wanted the chance to buy their council houses.

Through all the apparent banality of campaign speeches, politicians do, in fact, convey a message about themselves. There is a vital distinction between candidates who, mentally, face outwards and those who face inwards. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair all faced outwards: they instinctively wanted to communicate with voters, just as good actors or good preachers wish to reach their audiences. Although she may well win the Democratic nomination because of her standing with the party establishment, Hillary Clinton is a politician who faces inwards. She says she ‘found her voice’ in New Hampshire, but what does her voice say?

Since our parish newsletter does not have a wide circulation, I feel I am justified in plagiarising an article in the latest issue by its nature correspondent (my wife). She provides useful, or anyway, interesting information for Christmas decoration, with the preface that unless you wait until Christmas Eve before hanging up your greenery and be sure to take it down by Epiphany, every leaf will spawn a goblin: I. Holly. Tradition holds that if the holly you bring in is smooth-leaved, the woman of the house will dominate. If it is prickly, the man will be in charge. The botanical fact, though, is that all berried holly is female. Many believe that it is bad luck to cut down an entire holly (cutting branches is fine).

Politicians find it impossible to say they are against Freedom of Information because it sounds as though they must be hiding something if they do so. But the way FOI is now being used means that government will become more and more secretive. When David Cameron suggested in Parliament last week that Gordon Brown had not been contemplating changing the rules on inheritance tax until the Conservatives proposed doing so, the government used FOI to try to refute this, publishing document-based accounts of what had happened. This was opposed, I gather, by Treasury officials who could see that if recent government documents get dragged into party political games no one will commit his honest advice to paper.

Why is it good to make pupils stay on at school until they are 18? Under the Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech this week, state education will be compulsory for two more years unless the pupil is employed under an apprentice or training scheme. The political reason behind this is the government’s anxieties about young people known as NEETS (Not in Employment, Education or Training), of whom there are now about a quarter of a million aged 16 to 18. Obviously it would be good, in what people call the ‘knowledge economy’, if more of those trying to enter it had some knowledge. But it does not follow that forcing education on them will help. There are already huge problems of truancy, and of disruption of classes by those who do not want to be in them.

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week This week, Policy Exchange, of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, of literature found on the premises of more than 100 mosques. In about a quarter of the mosques, often ‘mainstream’ ones, some blessed by a visit from the Prince of Wales, the researchers found what could fairly be described as ‘hate’ literature — books with titles like Women Who Will Go to Hell (for, among another things, cutting their hair short), invitations to kill anyone who abandoned the Islamic faith, attacks on Jews, etc. Much of this material, about half of it published in English, comes from Saudi Arabia, whose King Abdullah has been having a rather edgy state visit here this week.

This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 ‘adult male inebriates’ until my great-grandfather and his second wife reclaimed it. Their reoccupation is commemorated by a carved panel in the dining room which quotes the first line of the 127 Psalm — ‘Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it’ — in Latin. The couple’s initials are picked out from the rest of text in gilt and the date — MCMVII — is shown by raised lettering.

There is much complaint that ‘ageism’ has toppled Sir Menzies Campbell. In theory, one must deplore prejudice against advancing years. Political leadership should come after accumulating decades of wisdom, rather than being treated, as Tony Blair seems to regard the premiership, as something to put on your CV. But the trouble is that Sir Ming’s leadership of the Liberals did exemplify the things that genuinely do get worse with age. He showed a slowness, a lack of mental agility, an imperviousness to new ideas. It was as if he were deaf. However, this column’s main explanation for his fall is the curse of the Iraq war.

Damocles was the courtier who told Dionysius the tyrant that his happiness was complete. Dionysius ordered Damocles to his banquet and sat him under a sword suspended by a single hair for the whole of dinner. I hope David Cameron is doing the same to any adviser who shows Damoclean tendencies. It is absolutely true that the Tories have done well, and that their leader has done better than any of them. This is the first time since John Major won the election of 1992 that any Tory leader has passed the second big test in his role (the first being to become leader at all). But almost all the volatility in the polls in the past fortnight was Tory volatility. Labour support remains steady, and at a level which, if replicated on the day, would still win Labour the election.

Its delivery was dull, but don’t puritanically fool yourself that the matter was better than the manner. It offered no new idea and made no attempt to reason with the audience about any of the phenomena in the modern world which might worry us. What is the nature of international Islamist terrorism? What is our foreign policy and what part are our troops playing in it? Why did we have an apparently sudden banking crisis last week? Mr Brown explained nothing about any of these things. Instead, he produced boilerplate faux-conservative phraseology about ‘our island’s story’ and ‘tough new powers’ against crime. He hymned the NHS for having had a 50 per cent success rate in saving his eyes.

For ten years, it has been said that Gordon Brown gave independence to the Bank of England. He never did, and this week dramatically reminds us of that fact. What he did was to give the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank the freedom to set interest rates. What he also did, however — and this nearly caused the then Governor, Eddie George, to resign — was to take away from the Bank its regulatory function. Since 1997, matters have been run by the ‘tripartite’ arrangement in which the Financial Services Authority makes the rules, the Bank handles the money and the government sticks its oar in. Some of the trouble surrounding the collapse of the Northern Rock has been to do with this. The FSA, being a regulator, is not suited to crisis management.

We are paying now for the lack of a single, comprehensive inquiry into the great foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. We were unprepared. Although foot-and-mouth information notices were first posted on 4 July, there was confusion when the Surrey outbreak was confirmed on Friday afternoon last week. People did not know how to operate the national ban on the movement of livestock. Some environmental health offices, closed for the weekend, did not open. The police had instructions to stop all movements (sensible) and impound all livestock that were moving (impossible). No one seemed to know about the EU directive on immediate ring vaccination. Once upon a time, though, there was a proper inquiry.

Enoch Powell once said to me, ‘I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to point it out.’ Enoch Powell once said to me, ‘I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to point it out.’ I thought of this last week when I took part in Radio 4’s Any Questions?, set up in the nave of Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire. The programme always has a ‘warm-up’ question before it goes live, and this time it was something to do with travel. Jonathan Dimbleby, the chairman, then asked the audience how many of them would be going abroad for a holiday this year. About three-quarters put up their hands.